Seeing Phish Play Madison Square Garden (Once)

Up until last night, I'd never heard a single song from Phish. This is not to say that I'd never been around their music — having attended college in the Northeast, I'm more than certain that Phish had washed down my ear canal at some point — but I've always felt about them the way a vegetarian feels about Osso Bucco. I'm sure that's a lovely veal shank, and I can imagine why people love it so, but I don't order that kind of thing at a restaurant.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

And, by and large, Phish is still not for me. But if you like Music — even if you've never driven a used Volvo, covered something with bumper stickers, owned several pairs of worn-down corduroys, attended an AP anything class, or smoked pot indoors with 20,000 people — you should see them play live at some point. Because Phish plays Music. All of it. At once. Every single kind you could ever think about. Bluegrass and classical and funk and arena rock and country and avant-garde jazz and Afro-Cuban and power pop and folk. Technically perfect. For four hours straight.

Most Popular

(But you must like Music. Not genres of music. Not D.C. hardcore, or East Coast rap, or Mancunian Brit pop. You must like all music. You cannot be an elitist prick who splits hairs.)

And you must like People (and to a lesser extent, Drugs and Computer-Controlled Impressive Stage Lighting*). Like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, People will be everywhere. Fat people jiggling like holy rollers, arms akimbo, clawing at the sky. Little dudes with glasses firing up bowls every five minutes. Dreadlocked girls twirling in slow circles, totally lost. Married couples groping furiously. (The babysitter came through!) Bathrooms, concourses, aisles, filled with writhing humanity, lit red then green then white, all doing a cross between "the swim" and the Carlton, screaming and throwing glow sticks. Ecstatic mobs hug and kiss each other for no reason other than Trey Anastasio played a minor C chord at the eight-minute mark of a jam. Alien, but intensely meaningful, somehow.

But more than anything else: You must not judge the Music, nor the People — no matter how embarrassed you may feel for yourself or for them — because that is not the Point. The Point is that everything is cool at a Phish show. The Point is no one can judge you here. (Or really, even arrest you: On my way in, I watched a security guard unzip a friend's purse, inadvertently finding the bag of weed she'd misplaced earlier in the evening, and wave her on through.)

The Point is that you go, you listen to four hours of music, you do whatever the hell you want, no one bothers you, and then you can repeat that experience for the rest of your life. I'm not going to, but everyone should go once.